It has been mostly through her succession of successful high-profile orchestral commissions that Helen Grime has become one of the most prominent voices among the younger generations of British composers. In that process of recognition Grime’s smaller-scale works have received relatively little attention, but as this collection of seven recordings from the Hebrides Ensemble shows, the same qualities that characterise her largest orchestral canvases distinguish her work on the smallest scale too.
The pieces here, composed between 2004 and 2016, range from a string sextet to a work for two horns, and Grime’s fastidious ear to colour and texture is evident in all the instrumental combinations. Several of the pieces take their inspiration from nature and landscape, though the sextet, Into the Faded Air, borrows its title from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets; Ted Hughes’s poetry lies behind the trio Snow and Snow, while the starting point for the crisp, vivid Seven Pierrot Miniatures, composed for the same instrumental lineup as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, is obvious enough. But as all the Hebrides’ performances demonstrate, this music can communicate even without any of its external references.
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